ABSTRACT
Back in 1996, it was claimed that ‘post-modernism is nothing more than the ideology of consumer capitalism’ (Hawkes, 1996, p. 12). To evaluate this statement, consider the legacy of postmodernism: it does not seem to have created a popular culture informed by the conceptual apparatus that underlies it. In other words, a contemporary population that is fully aware of issues such as binary opposition and the deferral of meaning does not exist outside the academic and intellectual spheres. Instead, the current world is marked by market fundamentalism, scientism, and a crude, non-reflexive form of relativism. How these ideologies can coexist is perhaps indicative of the fragmentary and pluralistic lifestyle discussed in postmodern literature, yet the impact of this fragmentation does not always come with the kind of playfulness or irony celebrated by postmodernists (Blackburn, 1998, pp. 279-310). The concoction of relativistic thinking and scientism, combined with market values, can spell disaster for education and the humanities. The distinction between a philosophy and a hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) can therefore be raised vis-à-vis postmodernism: is it a fully self-aware philosophy at home in the consciousness of ‘the many’ or is it a hegemonic force, always felt but rarely articulated? To further elaborate, think of the impact of postmodernist thought in connection to everyday discourse, especially in the field of education. Conventional disciplines such as biology, mathematics and economics remain largely intact; ‘traditional’ concepts such as knowledge, learning, truth, research, skills and ability are still widely used: they haven’t been replaced by concepts deemed more cogenial to postmodern philosophy. The fact that they are appropriated by neoliberal ideologies that reduce them to market-oriented values such as ‘outcome’, ‘employability’ and ‘efficiency’, suggests that postmodern ideas can easily give way to capitalist beliefs. When ‘reality’ is re-structured in accordance with capitalist mechanisms, what is happening is not the emergence of some mere social construction—a political act is taking place. (In concrete terms, when a student is made to believe that ‘reality’ forbids him or her from doing this or that, capitalism is reaffirmed.) Also worth considering is the fact that the emancipatory potentials of postmodernism are never fully realized: scepticisms towards truth and knowledge, the aversion to ‘grand narratives’, and the tendency to relativize, fail to blossom into full-fledged, radical critique. From this perspective, postmodernism is akin to fashion: it alters appearance temporarily while leaving everything else as it is. Students gain hardly any insight when they have simply ‘lived through’ the postmodern era. To obtain self-knowledge and become truly autonomous, they need to re-discover themselves through an active engagement with the pressing social and political issues of the day. This is a process deeply rooted in the first-person perspective and it cannot be accomplished through a surrogate in the form of an intellectual fad, whether it takes the form of Enlightenment, postmodernism, feminism or dialectical materialism.
